LiDAR-found “Lost Cities” May Never Have Been Lost at All, Scholars Warn

A growing number of archaeological breakthroughs, powered by advanced laser scanning, have been presented to the public as the dramatic rediscovery of “lost cities.” But according to a new academic review, many of these settlements were never truly lost. Instead, it is the framing by global media—and sometimes even scientific press releases—that has erased decades of Indigenous knowledge and earlier research.

The analysis, published in Advances in Archaeological Practice by Kathryn Reese-Taylor of the University of Calgary, examines three high-profile LiDAR studies from South America and Central Asia. Each case was originally presented in leading journals such as Nature and Science with careful technical detail. Yet once these studies reached wider media, headlines often declared that “mind-blowing” lost cities had suddenly been uncovered beneath jungles or mountains.

One of the most striking examples comes from a 2022 study of the Bolivian Amazon. Researchers used LiDAR to map monumental architecture, canals, and causeways across vast stretches of rainforest. The scientific article was measured in tone, highlighting “low-density urbanism” and stressing continuity with earlier findings. But within days, news sites from Smithsonian Magazine to Axios proclaimed that lost cities had been found in the jungle—implying that nothing had been known before the lasers revealed them. In reality, local communities had long been aware of the earth mounds, and archaeologists had documented hundreds of sites years earlier.

A 2024 Science paper describing two millennia of “garden urbanism” in the Ecuadorian Amazon triggered an even bigger media storm. More than 19 international outlets, including CNN, the BBC, and The Guardian, declared that archaeologists had stumbled upon an ancient Rome of the Americas. Yet, as Reese-Taylor notes, one of the largest sites had already been identified in 1978. Ecuadorian and Argentinian scholars had published preliminary LiDAR analyses before the Science article appeared. The truly new contribution was scale and synthesis—not the existence of the settlements themselves.

The pattern repeated in Central Asia. When UAV-LiDAR mapped medieval Silk Road fortifications in Uzbekistan in 2024, the journal article plainly noted that the sites had first been surveyed in 2011 and 2015. Still, major headlines announced that “long-lost mountain cities” had been unearthed. For Reese-Taylor, this reveals how “lost” has come to mean not forgotten by people on the ground, but simply undocumented with the latest scientific tools.

Written with the help of a news-analysis system.